But further than this, the feudal law, as it was then recognized in France, gave the king, in his manifold capacities as king, duke, and count, certain rights and certain obligations that are puzzling now, and must have been actually bewildering then. Henry, as Duke of Normandy, inherited the relation, entered into by his ancestor Duke Richard the Fearless, of vassal to the Duke of the Franks; but the Duke of the Franks had now become King of France. It was a serious question how the duties of vassalage were to be defined. As Duke of Normandy also he had a right to the feudal superiority of Brittany. Yet it was no easy thing to say how Brittany could be made to act in case of a quarrel between king and duke. The tie which bound him as Count of Anjou was different from that which bound him as Duke of Normandy to the same King of France. As Count of Poictiers he was feudally bound to the Duke of Aquitaine, but he was himself duke of Aquitaine, unless he chose to regard his wife as duchess and himself as count, in which case he would be liable to do feudal service to his wife only, and she would be responsible for the service to the King of France; a very curious relation for a lady who had been married to both. We do not, however, find, that this contrivance was employed by Henry himself, although it was used by John. And this same point of difficulty arose everywhere. The feudal rights of Aquitaine—the right, that is, to demand homage and service—extended far beyond the limits of the sovereign authority of the dukes, and it was always an object to turn a claim of overlordship into an actual exercise of sovereign authority. The tie between the great county of Toulouse and the duchy of Aquitaine was complicated both by legal difficulty and by questions of descent. The rights over Auvergne, claimed by both the king and the duke, were so complex as to be the matter of continual arbitration, and at last were left to settle themselves.
Questions of
boundary.
Personal
questions.
And to these must be added, in the third place, local and personal questions; local, such as arose from uncertain boundaries, the line which separated Normandy from France, the Norman from the French Vexin, being perhaps the chief; personal, arising from the enmity between Eleanor and her first husband, from the attitude of the house of Champagne, from which Louis VII. had selected his third wife, and which had the wrongs of Stephen to avenge. The Count of Flanders also was a pertinacious enemy of Henry.
Henry’s
true policy.
His French
wars.
Under these circumstances it is not difficult to see that Henry’s policy, however ambitious he might be, was peace; at all events, peace long enough to consolidate his dominions and crush antagonism in detail. And this must account for the fact that, with the exception of the war of Toulouse, in which Louis VII. took part, not as a principal but as an ally of the count, there was no overt war between Eleanor’s two husbands until it was produced by an entirely new quarrel. It could not be expected that there should be any love or friendship, but there was peace. Henry’s policy was peace; Lewis was averse to war, having neither skill nor resources. All Henry’s French campaigns, then, during this period were occasioned by the circumstances which have been thus stated. The object of the war of 1156 was, sad to say, the subjugation of Geoffrey of Nantes, the king’s own brother, who submitted to him, after he had taken his castles one by one, in the July of that year, and who died two years after. The business of 1158 was to secure the territories that Geoffrey had left without heirs, and, that done, to prepare for the enforcement of Eleanor’s claims on Toulouse.
War of
Toulouse,
1159.
The war of Toulouse, with its preparations and results, occupied the greater part of 1159, although the campaign itself was short. Henry had assembled his full court of vassals. William of Warenne, the son of Stephen, and Malcolm, King of Scots, followed him as his liegemen rather than as allies. Becket, as his Chancellor, came with an equipment not inferior to that of any of his earls and counts. Altogether it was a very splendid and expensive affair. The king marched to Toulouse; but at Toulouse was his enemy, his friend, his lord, his wife’s first husband. Henry could not proceed to extremes against the man whom in his youthful sincerity he still recognized as his feudal lord, and whose personal humiliation would have degraded the idea of royalty, of which he was himself so proud. So he left Becket to continue the siege and returned westward. The French were attempting a diversion on the Norman frontier. Toulouse, therefore, was not taken. Towards the end of the year a truce was made with Lewis, and early in 1160 the truce was turned into an alliance. But the alliance brought with it the seeds of new and more fatal divisions.
Henry’s
sons and
daughters.